Linguistics/English 395,
Spring 2009

The Transition to Early Modern English

Background: Culture, Society, Religion, Literacy

Part I: Forces for change and the spread of literacy, 1300-1400

As the medieval world entered its late phase in the 1300 and 1400s,
English society (and indeed, the society of all Europe)
began to undergo a rapid transformation.

After England began to recover from the worst bouts of the Black
Death, the economy improved along with general health and a middle
class began to emerge, especially in the towns.
Literacy was spreading among the top economic half of
the populace and as life improved
many people began to have a little more leisure time for reading and
writing, especially personal documents such as letters.

English became the language of the law courts in 1362 for the
first time since the Conquest, and a clerk class had to be educated in
written English for purposes of administering the business of the
courts. The royal court and its legal administration
were based in London and
London duly became the hub of a newly developing Standard English,
both spoken and written.

The development of legal and administrative English further
encouraged the spread of literacy in English. At the same time
public readings of poetry and stories became popular,
at first especially in French, but written stories and poems in English also began to
appear in the 1300s. Geoffrey Chaucer, a well-connected courtier and civil servant, began
writing in English in the 1380s, starting a new trend for creative literature
in English instead of French.

The Hundred Years' war began in 1337 and with it the start of English
nationalist feelings. People throughout the country felt part of a
national state that was opposed to Normandy and other dukedoms across the
channel, and especially opposed to the growing power of the
kingdom of France based around Paris. Royal proclamations by this time
were in English, and English was the native language of the monarchs.

During the 1300s and 1400s the old religious and social certainties began to
give way. A strong pressure toward church reform began to develop and
the church and the state (whose nucleus was the royal court) came to be at
odds. The royal court also came into conflict with the rest of the
aristocracy, i.e. the nobility, and there was a good deal of jockeying
for power between them. The English parliament emerged in an attempt by nobles to
limit royal prerogatives, particularly regarding their property. Serfdom was on its way
out as peasants were in a better bargaining position with landowners
because of the labor shortage created by the plague.

As part of a grassroots movement for church reform, during the late
1300s calls for the translation of the Bible into English began to
gather force, most notably in connection with an underground cult
whose members were called Lollards. Lollards wanted
greater accessibility of religious texts and ideas, and also wanted to
make the church hierarchy more responsive to their
congregations. (Ultimately, they wanted to do away with the
ecclesiastical power structure altogether.) Lollards also wanted a
greater measure of political freedom and democracy. For these reasons
they were considered highly subversive to both church and state and
were jailed or killed when exposed. A famous popular rebellion called
The
Peasant's Revolt or Wat Tyler's Rebellion occurred in 1381, led,
it turned out, by Lollards. The revolt was brutally suppressed.

During the Old English period there had been various translations of the
Bible into the vernacular for practical rather than ideological
reasons (e.g. it was easier to train priests in English than in
Latin). But by the 1300s the question of language became an
ideological one. The forms of liturgy and prayer had become
fossilized and religious doctrine, with its centuries of
interpretation and codification to determine which ideas would count as
true doctrine and which as
heresy, had become a straightjacket for
thought. The church hierarchy preferred
scripture, liturgical services, and theological literature to be
all in Latin, directly interpretable only by a priesthood under centralized
ecclesiastical control. Limitation to an ecclesiastical language
known only to the church elite enabled the systematic control of theological
ideas by church authorities. The church became increasingly wealthy, as
it collected money and property from the wealthy in exchange for
spiritual benefits it could confer. The wealth and power of the
institution was increasingly resented, above all because
it was widely seen as corrupt and self-serving, as well as ungodly.
Church officials lost respect as they no longer even tried to keep up
the appearance of following the rules of their holy orders.

John Wycliffe, one of the most prominent of the religious reformers,
translated the Bible into English in 1382. Hand-written copies were
widely disseminated among Lollards, although the text itself was banned in
England.

The church reform movement did not succeed at the time, as the trend
toward reform was stamped out with the Peasants' Revolt. The rebellion
horrified many people, especially those with even a little property,
and made them associate reform with political destabilization and anarchy.
Nevertheless,
many of the reformers' ideas came back in later eras and ultimately, in fact,
prevailed.

The idea of accessibility of scripture to the common people
that led to English Bible
translations was one of many at first heretical ideas that later became part of the
normal fabric of life in England. The increasing desire for and expectation of
accessibility of religious texts
was another important motivation for people to become literate.

Law, literature and religion were therefore all developing domains for
the spread of literacy in the late medieval period.
Once printing was introduced to Britain in 1476, literacy really began
to take off. Books, no longer being completely hand-made artifacts but
instead reproducible items,
came down rapidly in price and could be owned by others besides the
very rich.

Most of the earlier printed books were still religious in nature as
were manuscripts of the era before printing.
But once printing took hold, other genres began to develop: poetry,
travel tales, plays, histories, legal treatises,
and scientific texts all began to appear and the market for written
work in English grew quickly.

Part II: Religious and political developments in England post-1500 and consequences for the
monarchy

Religious developments picked up speed in the 16th century.
In the 1530s Henry VIII broke from the church of Rome and founded the
Church of England with himself as the supreme head. He still
considered himself a good Catholic and tried to ban Protestant reforms that were coming
from the European continent where Lutheranism was taking hold. His
son Edward was raised secretly as a Protestant and when he came to the
throne as Edward VI in 1547 he began to try to turn England to Protestantism. But he died
in 1553 at the age of only 15, unable to carry out his plans.

Edward's
elder sister Mary I came
to the throne in 1553 and tried to undo all of the religious moves away from Rome that
had taken place during her father's and brother's reigns.
She wanted to return England to the Church of Rome; in the process,
she burned Protestants and forced her
subjects to worship according to the old Catholic rites and liturgy.

Mary died in 1558 after 5 short but terrible years for Protestants.
She was unable to turn back the forces of Protestantism, by then
equated with church reform, partly because her own brutal suppression
of Protests and burning of holy men for heresy created a public
backlash; but also because increased trade and contacts with Europe
brought new religious ideas that were sweeping the populace.

The most
powerful of these ideas was that people did not need priests to relate
to God; they could pray in a personal way without such a religious
intermediary controlling their access to forgiveness and
salvation. Secondly, the idea of accessibility of scripture to the
common people popularized by the Lollards
continued to gain force. If scripture and theological ideas in
general should be directly understood by the people,
they needed access in their own language. It became obvious and
accepted that what was needed
were translations not only of the the Bible but also of all religious
services and writings into the common language, and the continued
development of a religious literature in English. Thirdly, the idea that
"the church" should really refer to the congregation of worshippers
rather than the ecclesiastical power structure of priests and bishops
was a major tenet of the new view taking hold. And finally, the Roman Catholic
doctrine of transubstantiation of the Eucharist during mass -- the
idea of the literal turning of bread and wine into the body and blood
of Christ -- was rejected by Protestant theologians.

At this point (1558) a third child of Henry came to the throne,
namely Elizabeth I. Elizabeth had largely Protestant sympathies but she
recognized a large conservative strain in the population who did not
want to accept all the tenets of Protestantism, and she also recognized
a large contingent of Catholics who preferred to continue to worship
through the Latin mass and Latin prayers.

Elizabeth worked to provide a religious settlement that balanced the
interests of the Catholicism, radical Protestantism (Puritanism, which
advocated total
church reform from the ground up), and all variations in between.
Her policies tended to the middle of the spectrum, with neither
extreme of puritanism nor catholicism favored.

Elizabeth ruled for 45 years and during her long and eventful reign
England became a firmly Protestant country.
The English Church under Elizabeth as Supreme Head
continued its progression toward Protestantism and re-formation of the
liturgy. Prayers were newly codified in the Book of Common Prayer and other
religious texts in English incorporating formerly heretical ideas were composed.

Scotland, the north of England, and Cornwall had many
more Catholics than the politically dominant and heavily Protestant part of Britain
(southeastern England). But before long Scotland itself became home to a variety of
Protestantism called Calvinism.

James I, the first Stewart monarch, took the throne after Elizabeth's
death. Like her he was Protestant, and he consolidated
the Church of England in essentially its modern form.
James commissioned the famous King James Bible or King James Version
(KJV) in 1611. Translation of the Bible into English was no longer a
controversial idea.

However, the conflict between Catholic and Protestant doctrine
sharpened, and interacted with nationalism: there were Protestant vs. Catholic
countries, and alliances and wars among them began to follow religious
lines. This conflict also interacted with the status of the monarchy,
as the religion of the monarch motivated people to fight for or
against that monarch.

James I's successor monarchs in the male line, Charles I, Charles II and James II, it
turned out, were either secretly Catholic, publicly Catholic,
or too sympathetic to
Catholicism for the populace, leading to a huge political conflict
between Catholicism and Protestantism. The latter was espoused by the
growing majority of the populace and thus there was increasing support
for a Protestant monarch and resistance to potential heirs who were or
were perceived as Catholic. The Catholic/Protestant tensions were
also bound up with the struggle between royal authority and
parliamentary authority and the growing insistence of the propertied
classes on having a say in government. What followed was civil war,
regicide, and restoration of the monarchy with somewhat diminished powers.

The Catholic/Protestant and royalist/parliamentarian conflicts led
ultimately, in the last part of the century, to the deposing of the
reigning Catholic monarch James II in favor of his Protestant daughter and
her Dutch husband. This so-called "Glorious Revolution" of 1688
brought Mary II and her husband
William of Orange (Orange was part of Holland) to the English throne. Mary's father
James II was deposed and her Catholic brother, James' heir (also
called James) rejected as king. The conflict
continued as long as Catholic descendents of James II lived, since
those descendents formed the focus of plots to return England to
Catholicism.

The English throne next passed to Mary's Protestant sister Anne in 1702
(again excluding Mary's and Anne's Catholic brother).
The Scottish throne,
until then separate, was incorporated into a new United Kingdom of
Great Britain under Anne in 1707.
Anne was the last
Stuart monarch; after her death without an heir in 1714 the succession passed
to the Protestant House of Hanover.